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Having been burned way too many times by wandering out of the 20% of things that frameworks make way easier into the 80% of things that frameworks make much more difficult, having access to the code has the potential to make it much more useful within reason.

Though, what I see as the main benefits of having the source code are in debugging issues with the code, and maintaining it once Microsoft pulls the plug on it and moves onto the next DAL dujour.

does the Entity Framework team carefully review changes and incorporate them into the official release ?

That would worry me. I really like EF. One of the reasons I like it is because I should be able to use and forget. It's plumbing and I don't really want to have to think about it once I start using it.

Still, it might be beneficial if bugs are caught and fixed; perhaps they'll get turned round a bit quicker than the usual MS release cycle. I'd just like to know that they've been properly tested.

"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." Red Adair.nils illegitimus carborundum

according to Scott Guthrie's blog it is to introduce more transparency to the framework and allow us to hightlight bugs etc.

well that offical as I know.

Lobster Thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce, served in a Provençale manner with shallots and aubergines, garnished with truffle pate, brandy and a fried egg on top and Spam - Monty Python Spam Sketch

http://entityframework.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Contributing[^]They lay out the project guidelines, coding conventions, as well as a step-by-step for contributing. They also say that you should discuss it with the team to ensure it follows the road-map. After that, they will review and test before any type of merge.

Oh thank god they took it open source, I have a senior dev agitating to use EF and a policy that says we cannot use open source code. The rel problem is that I think he may have an excellent case for us to go EF, now to make the decision weather the storm of getting the policy changed/exceptioned is worth it!

For legal reasons. There may be unknown patented code in the open source or the company may find something in the combined code base that is patentable. With any open source code in the mix, then the legal group cannot create patents on the new code/algorithm.

If you build on someone's framework then you take on some liability. End of story and open/closed source changes nothing. As for your company's ability to patent work, that remains a non-issue with open vs closed.

Now if you are talking about not working with GPL code because your company doesn't want to release, that actually could make some sense. But being open source does not equate to GPL or variants thereof.

¿Why not use open source?, i believe the open source community have made great tools and libraries that help you better than most closed source projects, our own policy is that we use open source as long as it's license is compatible with closed source projects, and if it's not we consider a commercial license, if available.

For things that Microsoft are providing that they see as "adding extra value" and "not aligned with our core revenue streams", they have made a decision to provide these technologies as open source. This means that things like EF and ASP MVC are now open source projects. This is a very good way for them to overcome the hostile reception they have had in the OS community in the past, while ensuring that they can entice a new generation of people to be locked into the MS stack.

would take a lot of effort to get familiar enough with the code for me

The same applies to any Open Source framework. Source is mainly to figure out specific issues. Very rarely I have modified any thing is an open source code. I rather worked around the issues in my own code after looking at the portions of the open source code which caused issues.

Providing us the code helps them to fix bugs and introduce new features slowly. Though, I really think its a ploy to have us write their API documentation. MS documentation in many of their 'open source' projects has been weak. Nothing worse then hitting F1, seeing the basic generated help text with no solid examples, references, or why's the item even exists.

You're right and it raised some eyebrowes here too. We feel EF is the best DAL that Microsoft has ever created. Just hope they don't drop it for some new intests in JavaScript and friends. We are a little worried that MS might not realize they have finally created a great set of tools for developing applications and go off in some weird direction chasing down some new language fad. XAML, EF, VS, C# should rule for business apps (and more) for a long time. I saw a suggestion that MS should put the CLI in the BROWSER! Why not? Cheers to all.

...before you were dragged out to the firing squad after being wrongly convicted of something to do with the dictator's favourite child [***fill in your own reason for execution if you wish, it isn't really relevant to the survey], what would it be?

Once I have enough items I will probably turn this into an actual survey.